Week 14: 29 January 2024 – Prelude and Fugue in D Major and Epiphany 3

Plus: Reinterpreting the Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue; Are (G)I-DLE trolling us again?; Hedayat's Blind Owl, and more!

As always, we recognize that Bond Chapel is situated in the traditional homeland and native territory of the Three Fires Confederacy—the Potawatomi, Odawa, and Ojibwe Nations—as well as other groups including the Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Miami, Peoria, and Sac and Fox. We remember their forced removal and dispossession, but also remember to speak of these groups in the present tense, as Chicago continues to be resound with tens of thousands of Native voices. 

This week, I’ve been listening to Minneapolis-based rapper Chase Manhattan (not the “Drippy Low-End Gangster Beats” Portland guy who also comes up if you google that stage name), who identifies himself as Pine Ridge Oglala, Leech Lake Anishinaabe, and Muscogee. Part of the fun of this music is his allegiance to a fairly old-school style, including both the flow and the beats; “For My Natives” sounds super ‘90s, and not at all in a bad way. (And that synth riff is really pretty good.) “#WholeTribe” sounds almost like a lost track off Enter the Wu-Tang. And I like the way he often switches up his flow in the back half of songs; “#MyTribe” is another good example. Hear him speak about his story and his music here.

Week 14: 29 January 2024 – Prelude and Fugue in D Major and Epiphany 3

Please save applause for the end of each set

Prelude and Fugue in E minor, BWV 533

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Fantasia in C minor, BWV 562

Erhalt uns, Herr, bei deinem Wort, BWV 1103

Machs mit mir, Gott, nach deiner Güt, BWV 957

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Trio Sonata in G, BWV 1039b

i. Adagio

ii. Allegro ma non tanto

iii. Andante

iv. Allegro moderato

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Prelude and Fugue in D, BWV 532

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Does any piece have as big a discrepancy between its reputation and its nickname as the “Cathedral” Prelude and Fugue (BWV 533)? I’m not exactly complaining: if you’ve read any of my previous sets of notes (if you haven’t: hello and welcome!), you’ll know that I tend to lament when organists and audiences don’t take a given piece seriously enough—and a nickname is generally a sign that listeners think a piece is worth talking about. After all, the vaguely dismissive act of calling the “Little” G-minor Fugue “Little” was still a sign that it’s salient enough to name at all; the G-minor Fugue BWV 535/ii doesn’t even get to be “Little.”

So, it’s nice that this piece gets a cool name. But also a surprise. The polite thing to say would be that this piece is “concise”: one page turn for the whole piece. More rude would be to say that it’s significantly less ambitious than most of Bach’s preludes and fugues without nicknames. The pedal part is somewhat sparse and quite easy; for that matter, so is the keyboard part, and the difficult parts in one never line up with complications in the other. (This is the exact opposite of most Bach fugues, which typically have the pedals come in at just the worst possible moment, and with their hardest music.) The really rude thing would be to say that this was the first Bach prelude and fugue I was ever given to play at the organ. “Beginners’ piece”?

OK, having sufficiently slandered this piece and questioned its nickname (what would Lutheran Bach think of “Cathedral” as a moniker?), it’s time to switch back to positivity. After all, this piece is actually nicely concise, and its lack of overcomplications is pretty refreshing given Bach’s tendency toward overwriting. Certainly the musical material is still distinctive and has plenty of panache: the harmonies still crunch, the fingers still fly, and the fugue still fugues. 

Maybe that’s the most misleading part of “Cathedral” as a nickname: it implies a degree of stuffiness that I think doesn’t fit this piece.¹ To some extent, what this piece really does is let us imagine a different Bach, one who’s aired out the cupboards a bit. It’s not quite the early-teenage exploratory mode of the Neumeister Chorales, but it’s also not the somewhat overwrought and tightly wound style of so much of the later music. Keep this piece in mind when you hear the other E-minor Prelude and Fugue (the “Wedge”) in a few weeks.

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Speaking of overwrought and tightly wound—sorry, let me start over. What I meant to say is: the C-minor Fantasy is expressive and contrapuntally dense. Making his French Baroque influence more obvious than usual, Bach writes in a huge number of ornaments, giving this piece a somewhat airless (some of Bach’s contemporaneous critics would say cluttered) feeling: the overlapping trills and appoggiaturas combine with the incessant entrances of the theme to produce an unending stream of musical events. The result is almost overpowering. It can be overwhelmingly beautiful or emotional; but it can also just be overwhelming.²

Maybe it’s a relief after that to get back to the earliest Bach with two more Neumeister Chorales. “Erhalt uns” is a nice, straightforward, solemn chorale fugue. And so is “Machs mit mir” (er, not “solemn”), although the chorale may be less obvious until it comes in at the end. Actually, it’s so unobvious that it went completely undetected until the ‘80s. You might have noticed that this is one of the very few “organ” pieces I’m playing that has a BWV number in the 900s; its neighbors are more Goldberg Variations (BWV 988) than “Nun komm” (BWV 599 for one). In other words, this piece was once classified as a work for harpsichord—and simply labeled “Fugue in G Major.” It took until the Neumeister manuscript was reexamined for the chorale’s influence in the fugue to be heard. A good story and a delightful piece.

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Everybody loves the trio sonatas. (Except maybe organ students breaking their teeth on them for the first time.) They hit a perfect sweet spot between the more extroverted, large-scale preludes and fugues and the miniatures of the Orgelbüchlein. More to the point, they’re not based on chorales, they’re not in a free, “improvisatory” style, and they’re not strict fugues. In other words, they’re Italian chamber music, not German organ music.

But in some ways their style is more “orchestral” than “chamber,” to the extent that that distinction makes sense for this time period. Specifically, all of them are three-movement pieces in the pattern “fast-slow-fast”: that’s the format of a (Vivaldian) concerto, not a trio sonata. The vast majority of Bach’s other pieces labeled “Sonata”—whether actual trio sonatas or for violin, flute, or gamba—are in the more typical “slow-fast-slow-fast” format.³ So this piece, BWV 1039b, is an opportunity to experience something more like a typical Bach trio sonata.

Of course, as the “non-organ” BWV number indicates, that’s because this piece is an actual Bach trio sonata, at least in one of its incarnations. Two complete versions of this piece survive from Bach, a gamba sonata (BWV 1027) and a trio sonata for two flutes (BWV 1039 itself); those two versions are essentially the same except for the changes in instrumentation. But beyond those, there are also anonymous copies of three of the movements in arrangements for organ. (More on the odd movement out below.) 

Since they’re anonymous and only survive in copies, these arrangements aren’t necessarily by Bach, but maybe by one of his students; Johann Peter Kellner is a popular guess. But whoever made the arrangements had clearly learned some serious pedal technique and could play parts as independent as those in the BWV 525–30 organ trios. The arrangement may simplify some of the bassline relative to the BWV 1027/39 originals, but this piece is still as fully-fledged an organ trio as any of the canonical six. And, as any Baroque flute or gamba player (or, for that matter, any cellist who learned “Allegro Moderato” from Suzuki Book 3) knows, this is a really lovely piece. I understand that finding it requires looking outside of “complete Bach organ works editions,” but I really wish organists would play it.

The “standard trio sonata” format gives rise to differences beyond which movements are fast and which are slow. Take the first movement: there’s nothing else in Bach’s organ music quite like this slow siciliana, with its long measures of lilting Italianate melody. As often when Bach opens with a slow movement, the tune is luxuriously long-breathed, unfolding for almost half a minute in one part before the other gets a chance. And all the voices, including the pedals, get a go with at least parts of the tune; there’s a beautiful effect, both visually and musically, when the three parts clamber on top of each other to play their own version of the same five-note descending figure:⁴

Only in the first trio sonata does Bach give the pedals such an equal part in the action of a slow movement.

Take that and double it for the two fast movements. Both of these movements are fugue-style, with a long tune successively and repeatedly getting played, and played around with, in each voice. The first fast movement even engages in tricks like flipping the tune upside down and playing it against the right-side-up version. But neither of these movements “sounds like a fugue” (unlike, say, the finale of Trio Sonata No.2): neither is written in old-fashioned “contrapuntal” style, with themes that would be typical of choral music or 17th-century keyboard fugues. Instead, they resemble the joyful, athletic style of fugues like the Brandenburg 2 finale. We’re just here to have fun.

Except the third movement. Maybe it’s telling that this is the one movement without a surviving organ version: it’s dark, poignant, and overall quite hard to make sound sufficiently expressive on organ. (It doesn’t help that the two upper parts are meant to use quite different articulation patterns at the same time.) Even if this movement isn’t a marathon for the fingers or feet in the same way as the others, it’s still a huge challenge for the organist—and a rewarding one.

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Speaking of huge challenges. The D-major prelude and fugue, for better or for worse, has a reputation as one of Bach’s biggest organ showpieces. That status comes with a whiff of disdain: I’ve definitely seen organists turn up their nose at this piece, given that it’s clearly meant to dazzle more than anything else. Isn’t it embarrassing or déclassé to play music so oriented toward stunning the audience? Aren’t we supposed to be better than those pianists playing Hungarian Rhapsodies? Isn’t Bach supposed to be better than this?

Strangely, I don’t think I’ve ever heard these criticism thrown at most of Bach’s other ultra-showy preludes and fugues: not at the “Great” G-minor, not at the A-minor, and not at the “Wedge”, which contains pages of empty scales to match anything in Liszt:

On the other hand, I have heard a little bit of this snobbery applied to the F-major Toccata and the Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue. To say nothing of the Pièce d'Orgue.

I can’t help but notice that all of the “serious” pieces are minor and the “empty calories” ones are major. Showing off is OK as long as you’re not too cheerful about it—as long as it isn’t supposed to make the audience too happy at the same time.

I think that perception may be more on us than Bach, and I think it also depends on associations with major and minor keys that have been deeply baked into our ears (sorry for the mixed metaphor) by the Beethoven cult. It’s easy for us to hear minor-key music and think it’s “personal,” “sophisticated,” or at a minimum “expressive.” But those forms of expression can be extremely conventional: the namesake “Wedge” of that fugue is certainly wrenching to listen to, but there’s nothing particularly original about its use. It’s just as much of a musical formula as the running figure that opens the D-major fugue.

Really, the D-major fugue is more original, at least when it comes to organ writing. Remember that most of us have a maximum of two feet. So what the heck are you supposed to do with a fugue subject like this?

By making this his subject, Bach is announcing to the organist that she’s constantly going to need to cross one foot in front of the other, four times a measure, at speed. No other composer at the time (and few since) wrote like this.

That’s to say nothing of the opening, which is probably the second most famous in Bach’s organ works (you know what’s first):

Yes, it’s just a scale, which would be a piece of cake for the fingers—but it’s an awkward mess for the feet. (You can simulate the experience by trying to play it with your two index fingers.) And you can’t even white-knuckle it by grabbing the bench, since the hands jump in straight after.

Even if you think that these innovations are still just virtuoso fluff (“cool…scales?”), there’s a lot else going on in both the prelude and the fugue. For starters, the prelude itself contains a fugue, a long and somewhat old-fashioned alla breve that typically gets played far too slowly. (The way to make a contrast with flashy music isn’t to make the other music boring.) And it sandwiches that alla breve between minor-key music dramatic enough to have been used alongside the C-minor Passacaglia in The Godfather’s baptism scene. 

Meanwhile, the Fugue ranges quite widely over the harmonic landscape, going as far afield as C-sharp minor. Oddly, this piece always goes “up” the circle of fifths, adding sharps and ratcheting up the intensity; normally you’d expect the grand conclusion to include a prolonged relaxation toward the flat side of the spectrum. This piece eschews that move and keeps the tension high until the end. It’s quite a canny harmonic effect, and a rather subtle one at that. There’s more to this piece than meets the ear.

Metrical reinterpretation, or: how much is it OK to add?

Forgive me a little esprit de l’escalier this week. I hope I’m not starting a chain reaction of constantly talking about the previous week’s music, but I couldn’t resist in this case: I had a bit of a brainwave about the Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue last week after writing my post. Specifically, I sort of relearned the fugue the day before the concert.

I doubt this brainwave was that original: I may have heard it somewhere, or heard a teacher broach or dismiss it as a possibility (thanks to Martin Jean and Thomas Trotter for excellent coachings on this piece). And really, I wonder if I had the same idea once and simply forgot it, because it makes this fugue a great pairing with the A-major fugue on the same program. Is that why I put them together?

OK, enough stalling. The basic idea is to reinterpret the fugue subject itself. Here it is in staff notation:

Here it is in Ton Koopman’s excellent recording:

And here it is the way I played it on Monday:

That’s not a huge difference, but I hope it’s still audible. Koopman, like most performers, groups the eighth notes of each measure by threes. That matches the time signature of 6/8 and other aspects of the notation: even if you can’t read this score, you can see that the single beams typically group three notes together. You could scat it out as “TUM ta-da-dum, TUM-tum-tum, TUM.”

Meanwhile, I’ve decided to regroup the first measure (“against” the notation) by twos: “TUM-ta-da DUM-di DUM-di, DUM.” Three stronger beats per measure instead of two. (If this kind of thing is starting to sound familiar, perhaps it’s because you read what I had to say last week about the A-major fugue.)

Why would you ever play in a way that “contradicts” the notation? Well, almost everyone, including Koopman, does at some points in this piece. For instance, the cadence in measure 9 (about 15 seconds into the Youtube link above) has a long note on beat 5, implying that it’s strong and thus giving a grouping ONE-two THREE-four FIVE-six. I’m sort of back-applying that effect (“reverse hemiola”) to the beginning.

But why apply it there? For one, it helps bring out a slight tension in the music that I think is typically underemphasized. If you simplify the theme ever so slightly, you get these notenames:

CEECEC|G

Just reading this string off and grouping “naturally” (following various gestalt principles) you can easily end up with two different results:

CEE CEC|G

CE EC EC|G

These two groupings are based on two different repeating patterns in the music: this tune repeats both [CXX][CXX] and [EC][EC]. There’s no way to bring out one without deemphasizing the other. Actually, there are lots of examples like this: some people hear the opening flute tune of “The Moldau” as “One-two-three, One-two-three, One,” although it always sounded like “One-two One-two One-two, One” to me. (I owe this example to Rick Cohn, who, drawing on Victor Zuckerkandl, has by far the best discussion I’ve seen of these metrical issues.)

Bringing out the [EC][EC] pattern adds a nice push-and-pull to the piece, and I think it helps build things up to the climax. I already illustrated this passage last week, but here it is again with lines to indicate what I find to be natural metrical groupings: 

This is frankly insane, a total pileup of switching between counts in threes and twos, often at different times in each of the hands. (You may make different choices from me, but it’s jarring basically no matter what you do.) For me, complicating the opening theme a bit helps to set up this climax, to give a bit of foreshadowing. Without it, these sudden switchups always sounded like a ball out of left field to me.

Still, what gives me the right to do this? After all, if you just want to make things more interesting, you can very often regroup a passage in more ways than you’d expect. Another example from Cohn (derived from an example in Carl Schachter’s Unfoldings; the piece is Scarlatti K.545):

Each of these is plausible to varying degrees, but I would raise a couple of eyebrows at a performer who played any of them except the second (which groups by the original notated meter). There’s nothing else in the piece to motivate the switchup; it’s just extra metrical complication for the sake of it. Needless to say, I don’t think that’s what I’m doing with the C-major fugue; I hope I’ve given some decent reasons above why I think that the reinterpration might be fair game.

But even when there might be good musical reasons to bring out a metrical switch, it’s probably best to be careful. Take this passage from the Prelude to Bach’s sixth English Suite:

—which you can hear at around 5:59 in this recording: 

Egarr, like every harpsichordist I’ve heard play this piece,⁵ plays this passage resolutely in 9/8, grouping every sixteenth note by twos. That’s despite the visually obvious fact that there are groups of three sixteenth notes absolutely everywhere in this passage, cutting across the duple grouping (the eighth notes). 

I think it’s a shame not to bring out that tension, but I also think that going overboard and hammering out the triple grouping—“ONE two three ONE two three” for each set of sixteenths—would both produce a weirdly “Latin” effect and lose out on the push-and-pull that makes passages like this fun. Part of the interest is hearing how the “pitch-based” grouping of three ascending notes clashes with the “rhythmic” grouping by twos; making the rhythm conform entirely to the pitches flattens things out too much.⁶

And maybe I’m flattening the C-major fugue subject out too. Obviously, when first trying something out, it’s tempting to be pretty heavy-handed: “NOW you’re gonna hear something new.” So I hope I haven’t made things jarring or awkward. But I also hope that other people try this approach to this fugue (if they haven’t already). Sometimes, some of the most interesting aspects of this music need a little help to come out.

What I’m Listening To

Sol Gabetta and Bertrand Chamayou – Mendelssohn

I wouldn’t really call myself a Sol Gabetta fan,⁷ and, even as a dormant cellist, the Mendelssohn Sonatas aren’t exactly my favorite repertoire. But I’m really glad I gave this album a go.

Gabetta and Chamayou are always at minimum very good—sleek and stylish—but I think this may be the best I’ve heard them play. Everything is just very committed, which is doubly impressive given that Chamayou is a non-specialist playing on a fortepiano; he doesn’t sound afraid of his instrument at all, and is instead willing to really get into its full range of sounds, even those verging on the ugly. (You know how much I appreciate ugly sounds.) Similarly, Gabetta is willing to go wispy, brushy, full-bodied, ping-y, bouncy, and just about everything in between. The finales of both Sonatas are great fun, and I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a pair take the Variations concertantes so seriously. 

Aside from the choice of piano, I wonder if the choice of repertoire may also have helped elicit this playing. While it’s a horrible missed opportunity to have left off Fanny Hensel’s Fantasia o Sonata in G minor, I strongly suspect that adding a selection of contemporary works inspired by Mendelssohn’s Lied ohne Worte for cello and piano helped open up the sonic palette Gabetta and Chamayou use for their Mendelssohn. But don’t let me fall into the trap of the album’s title and make this all about the  Mendelssohn—Rihm and Holliger’s pieces in particular are fabulous by themselves, and I was happy to discover Francisco Coll. An album full of nice discoveries.

Hocine Benameur – Souk System

Maybe you’ll find Hocine Benameur’s self-presentation obnoxious. He certainly fits into a certain kind of “world music” type, playing every instrument and every style, with a musicology degree to boot (never a good sign). This attitude is almost always a liability: when it comes to making an album, he runs the risk of either making a completely incoherent mishmash of styles, or of making everything sound kinda the same—the “expensive fast food in a bowl” approach to musical eclecticism.

Your mileage may vary, but I think Benameur actually does a pretty decent job of avoiding both of those extremes. Incoherence is kept at bay by the use of a fairly consistent set of EDM sounds and beats, together with (lord help me) Islamicate tuning systems, modes, and oud and guitar playing that provide another through-line. In this context, tracks like “Le Tango Arabic” or “Touachtek” (with its clear evocation of South Asian alaps) have a clear place, translating a variety of musical elements into a single language without losing their distinctiveness.

Of course, none of that matters if the music doesn’t grab you in some way. Luckily, for my money, this is also a pretty great dance record. Put on “Mademoiselle” or “Kiffeche” and see if you can stop yourself from grooving along as well.

Dieuf-Dieul de Thiès – Dieuf-Dieul de Thiès 

Dieuf-Dieul de Thiès certainly have an interesting story. Having formed in 1979 and cut a few records before disbanding in 1983, their music was rediscovered and released in 2013. And now they’ve been picked up by a relatively notable “world music” label (Buda), so they’re back in the studio recording old and new songs, and even going on tour.

Maybe I’m a sucker, but I think this is the rare case where time (and time apart) hasn’t necessarily dulled a band’s edge. I find that these new studio recordings and live performances compare pretty favorably to the original 1980s records. The singing is still vibrant, the playing is groovy, and the sonics are now much improved. (Or really, I should probably stick to saying that there’s been more money put into the recording now, and the engineering is now geared much more toward people who listen the way I do.)

As for the music itself, it’s a great mishmash: psychedelic-rock guitars, horns from Latin jazz and highlife (?), riffs and licks from Cuba and Jamaica, and percussion from all over. The guitar sound in particular is to die for—both the solo and the rhythm tracks in “Galo” are fantastic. And look forward to how the band combusts at the end of the two live tracks at the end. When I first heard the horns start doubling (mocking?) the singer at the end of “Ndiguële,” I just about fell out of my chair.

(G)I-DLE – “Wife”

Are (G)I-DLE serious?

This is the question that’s hung around each of Idle’s singles since “Nxde.” Or really, in some ways it’s hung around the group since the beginning: the reason Idle uses such ridiculous (s)t-ylization is because the original name sounds like “kids” (aideul) in Korean. Of course, that’s the point: Idle=idol and idols are infantilized. If the name sounds inappropriate for a group with a “mature” image, that’s partly because it forces us to confront a dynamic that’s usually easier to ignore.

Still, the music that made Idle famous was reasonably serious stuff. “Oh My God,” about entrusting oneself to a potential femme fatale; “Lion,” about self-affirmation and “tearing down” prejudice; “i’M THE TREND,” with its classic braggadocio; the whole I Burn album with its dark and inventive sonics; and of course “Tomboy” with its mockery of gender stereotypes:

(It didn’t hurt for this “serious” image that Idle write and produce most of what they put out, and that Soyeon is genuinely a pretty good rapper, even if “Tomboy” isn’t her best showcase.)

Ever since the smash global success of “Tomboy” (and perhaps also related to Soojin’s departure over bullying accusations), Soyeon clearly decided to lean into “mockery.” So you get “Nxde,” a.k.a. “Tomboy but now with the Carmen Habañera”:

And then last year’s infamous “Queencard,” also something of a “Tomboy” retread:

That said, I’m not much for “Nxde” overall, but “Queencard” is spectacular dumb fun. Obviously something is still being mocked—presumably the people who criticized “Nxde” for its “leaning in” to a “sexy” image. So now Idle make “sexy” part much more overt: “My boob and booty is hot” and “I’m twerking on the runway.” And at the same time, those lines are clearly not supposed to be taken at all seriously; if it wasn’t obvious enough from reading them, watch the video and see how silly the choreography looks, or check out just how goofy Shuhua can get singing it. So it’s a pretty stupid song overall, but all in the spirit of ridicule. “Queencard” is ridiculous because Idle’s critics are. Or something like that.

On the other hand, the random hospital scenes in the music video might indicate that there’s something else going on; it’s part two of a story that begins with the deadly earnest (but what a great chorus!) “Allergy”:

The ending of this video makes the common thread pretty clear: if “Allergy” is a song about insecurities, “Queencard” would then be something like an anthem to not caring how you look or sound to others. As a response to anti-fans who criticize Soyeon’s (rather obvious) cosmetic surgeries, it’s quite a one-two punch: try to make them feel bad, and then twerk in their faces. If they get mad about the choreography and imagery (“think of the children!”), all the better.

Still, “Allergy” itself can also sound a little funny, for the same reason as “Queencard”: lines like “I’m a hater of Instagram / hater of TikTok” and “She so pretty / Yea so lovely / She got everything / Why am I not her” join “Queencard”’s infamous “Look so cool look so sexy like Kim Kárdashián / Look so cute look so pretty like Aríaná” and its chorus that rhymes “hot” with “hot.” Like everyone else, I’ve complained about Soyeon’s English lyrics, and I’ve even done it here; I highly doubt she’s read anything I have to say, but she’s surely seen at least some of the endless memes and comments about them.⁸

You know what’s coming next. After all the complaints about “overly sexual” and “ungrammatical” lyrics, we now get lyrics so explicit that the song was banned by KBS—with the opening salvo “I cook cream soup, taste is Coco Loco / Want me your wife, but she is.” If the English wasn’t purposefully weird before, it almost certainly is now. There’s twerking in the choreography too, for good measure. (Already a staple for Idle when they want to troll audiences.)

So “Wife” is not a serious song (as if you needed anybody to say that after seeing the music video thumbnail). But it’s not a “Queencard” either; it’s much more like “Nxde” in making a travesty of what men want from their wives. (Having the members look practically indistinguishable and dress in vaguely hospital-orderly outfits for the video really helps send the message home.) This song is more sarcastic than silly, even if it’s not very serious.

“Wife” is also not a “Queencard” musically. For starters, it’s not nearly as catchy, in part because it’s not written as a pop song at all—the chorus is pure attitude, no hook. (Although of course its lyrics make it impossible to repress from your memory.) Really, it makes me wonder if “Wife” might also be a response to fans and critics who’ve complained that Idle in general and Soyeon in particular have gone away from their more hip-hop origins. Even if the song is kind of a practical joke, these verses are also some of Soyeon’s best in years, and she gives strikingly complex raps to Miyeon (a singer) and Shuhua (not much of a singer or rapper, and still working on her Korean). If, in addition to being a thumb in the eye of critics, the sheer raunch of the lyrics is drawing on Cardi B or Megan Thee Stallion, maybe some inspiration rubbed off from them. 

Of course, the “Allergy” to “Wife”’s “Queencard” might drop with the rest of the album on Monday. Or the rest of the album may continue in this vein (try googling “red five diamonds”). Either way, I can’t wait for Soyeon’s next round of mockery.⁹

Also liked…

(I liked a lot of music this week apparently!)

Talea Ensemble and Harlem Chamber Players – Julius Eastman: Feminine

IU – “Love Wins All” (the video more than the song)

Aquila Altera – Paradigma Medioevo: Music from 14th-century Italy

Keyon Harrold – Foreverland

dress – How Deep is Your Love

Mariachi Los Camperos – Sones de Mariachi

kinoue64 – 幸せに暮らそうね

Ulysses Owens Jr. – A New Beat

What I’m Reading

Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl is nothing new (almost 100 years old, in fact), but this translation kind of is, and I was happy to get around to it this week.

What a book. It’s a brutal read—think the kind of lacerating, psychologically intense narration you get in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground or Hamsun’s Hunger—and, even though it’s quite short, not a fast one either. Not that the prose is difficult (this translation is quite plainspoken, which purportedly reflects the original Persian), or that there are tons of plot points or characters to keep up with. Instead, this book forces you to slow down by making you question your own sanity (mirroring the narrator’s mental state).

We’ve all had that experience of accidentally skipping back to a sentence or paragraph you’ve already read, maybe even multiple times—or losing your place and not remembering that you’ve read this section until a ways in, when the déjà vu really hits. This book constantly gives you that experience, repeating descriptions, lines of dialogue, images, incidents, and characterizations. Each of those details thus comes unmoored and begins to float around dizzyingly, recombining with the others at will. The plot of the book is actually quite easy to follow, but all of those free-associating phrases make you doubt that you’ve followed it.

Then there’s the overall structure of the book; not to spoil too much of the plot, but it seems fair to disclose that the second part of the book (roughly two-thirds of its length) is something like a dream-state, or perhaps novel-within-a-novel, reworking of the first. Or it certainly feels and is set up that way, even though nothing at all from the first half occurs the same way in the second. In any case, this format takes Hedayat’s hallucinatory repetitions and sets them on a much wider stage. 

A bewildering and intense novel, but one that certainly lives up to the hype.

A few others: 

• Gravy – The Soul of Alaska

• London Review of Books – Incapable of Sustaining Weeds: What happened in Tigray

• Chemistry World – How a new carbon allotrope could change the definition of aromaticity

• Current – Chantal Akerman, 1968–1978: The Weight of Being

• Current World Archaeology – Japan’s royal tombs: Burial mounds and Korean connections in the 3rd-8th centuries AD

Thanks for reading, and for listening if you can make it on Monday!

1. To be fair, I think people are too stuffy about most Bach pieces.

2. I hope that’s a sufficient number of “over-” words for one paragraph.

3. Notable exceptions: the G-minor gamba sonata BWV 1029 and the B-minor flute sonata BWV 1030.

4. This is from the two-flutes version; I don’t have a ready scan of the organ version.

5. Sadly, my favorite recording (by Carole Cerasi) isn’t available to stream anywhere as far as I can tell

6. Harald Krebs, a very good pianist himself, has written eloquently about these kinds of performance issues (with metrically dissonant music) in his Schumann book and other places.

7. Same for Bertrand Chamayou, even if I love him for being one of the few pianists to record Franck’s solo music.

8. Meanwhile, Suga gets off scott free for having IU sing the truly unintelligible lines “So time is yet now, right here to go / I know, you know, anything does know / So time is yet now, right here to go / Nobody doesn't know anymore.”

9. To those who protest that I’ve made this too much about a single person, LET THE RECORD STATE that my most-played Idle songs are Minnie’s “Change” and “Sculpture,” and my favorite personalities from the group are Yuqi and Shuhua.